pzozulka
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VMware: Ethernet Adapters
All of our VMs are running on eithre flexible or E1000 ethernet adapters. Is there a benefit in switching to VMXNET adapters? Will we see any performance benefits or is it unnoticable?
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1. Yes, it's a better network interface.
2. Yes.
if you are currently happy with your chosen solution, do not change it.
2. Yes.
if you are currently happy with your chosen solution, do not change it.
ASKER
I think this is also a great link for any future purposes. Compares legacy NIC (e1000) to VMXNET:
http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/perf_comparison_virtual_network_devices_wp.pdf
http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/perf_comparison_virtual_network_devices_wp.pdf
ASKER
After reading the suggested material and learning more about the differences, here are my conlcusions.
Please correct me if I'm wrong.
1. If our underlying physical network is only 1Gb, using VMXNET3 will not make traffic between VMs and physical servers go any faster than the physical limit of 1Gb.
2. If our underlying physical network is only 1Gb,
Please correct me if I'm wrong.
1. If our underlying physical network is only 1Gb, using VMXNET3 will not make traffic between VMs and physical servers go any faster than the physical limit of 1Gb.
2. If our underlying physical network is only 1Gb,
VMs running older OS -- Windows XP or Windows Server 2003 will only see marginal improvements. In our environment a Windows XP VM use to show 1.0 Gbps in the XP taskbar, and now shows 1.4 Gbps on the new VMXNET3 adapter.
VMs running newer OS -- Windows 2008 and up offer support for parallelism by allowing network processing on different cores simultaneously so networking throughput between VMs on same host will be limited by the processor speed and its ability to handle high volume network processing tasks. So we should see higher network performance improvement on VMs with newer OS. Communication with VMs on other hosts, or other physical machines will be limited by the Gigabit NIC of the ESXi host.
We can only advise and recommend if you have time in the future to alter machines to use vmxnet3
Any new machines we would recommend you use vmxnet3.
Any new machines we would recommend you use vmxnet3.
I find issues with using VMXNET3 if your physical network is 1 Gbps and having mixed older OS's.
I recommend sticking to E1000 interfaces until your physical network infrastructure catches up.
I recommend sticking to E1000 interfaces until your physical network infrastructure catches up.
ASKER
Having said that:
1) Will VMs running VMXNET3 see any performance gain when communicating with VMs on other hosts? Why/How?
2) Will VMs running VMXNET3 communicate with other VMs on same host with same network adapter at 10GB?